VMware is expanding its business to new markets, and pulling out of others, in an attempt to gain a more solid foothold in the cutthroat cloud market.  The rivalry against Amazon is getting increasingly heated in the enterprise space, each cloud provider pushing one initiative after another to claim the bulk of this bubbling opportunity for long-term clients.

The virtualization giant recently unveiled new details about the Pivotal Initiative,   an upcoming joint venture with EMC that will be responsible for promoting the two companies’ growing cloud assets: Cloud Foundry, Spring and a few others.  The two firms hope that by spinning off their cloud IP together and 1,250 of their top engineers, they will be able to cash in on promising projects that they have not been able to optimally monetize so far.

VMware is no still interested in maintaining its open-source cloud initiatives, but at the same time it is increasingly applying service-oriented participles to its commercial offerings.

Last month the firm introduced a new release of its Horizon Suite, an enterprise end point management bundle that has only launched a few months ago. What stood out the most was the introduction of a new component, Horizon Workplace, which allows admins to implement and enforce policies based on user-specific – rather than device-specific – authorizations. VMware specified that the software enables the creation of “centralized managed IT services” profiles for employees.

Amazon is competing over the same enterprise sector that the virtualization firm is targeting with Horizon Suite, along with its core virtualization and data center administration portfolios. The cloud provider is appealing to the big license buyers with scalability and cost-effectiveness, much to the chagrin of the senior brass at VMware.

At a recent partner meeting, CEO Pat Gelsinger remarked that “if a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost together.” COO Carl Eschenbach voiced similar concerns, and revealed his firm’s plans to keep up with AWS.